Boy's skull pierced with screw in treehouse-building accident

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Photos:Screw accidentally lodged in boy's skull

An x-ray shows the screw partially embedded between the two halves of Darius Foreman's brain.

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Photos:Screw accidentally lodged in boy's skull

Dr. Shenandoah Robinson (left), a neurosurgeon, cut the board off Foreman's head with the help of nurse John Mullen (right) before her neurosurgeon husband, Dr. Alan Cohen, removed the screw.

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Photos:Screw accidentally lodged in boy's skull

Foreman was conscious the entire time before the operation, Cohen said.

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Photos:Screw accidentally lodged in boy's skull

The screw removed from Foreman's skull. The doctors gave it to him as a keepsake.

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Photos:Screw accidentally lodged in boy's skull

Foreman is expected to make a full recovery, Cohen told CNN.

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Photos:Screw accidentally lodged in boy's skull

Foreman received gifts as he was discharged on Thursday -- coincidentally, his 13th birthday.

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Story highlights

A six-inch screw pierced a boy's skull, right between the brain's two hemispheres

The boy was "a millimeter away" from bleeding to death, his neurosurgeon said

(CNN)A freak accident nearly took the life of a 13-year-old Maryland boy last weekend when a 6-inch screw entered his skull, his family and doctor told CNN.

Darius Foreman was building a treehouse Saturday when he fell from a branch, knocking over a five-foot-long wooden board, which came down on top of his head, his mother Joy Ellingsworth recounted.

An X-ray from Johns Hopkins Hospital, where the boy was airlifted, shows a portion of the screw lodged right between the two halves of the brain -- threatening to tear the largest channel that drains blood and other fluids from the brain. Injury to this part of the brain could have been "catastrophic," according to his surgeon, Dr. Alan Cohen.

"He was a millimeter away from having himself bleed to death," Cohen, chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, told CNN.

"I absolutely panicked," Ellingsworth said. "It was very scary, one of the scariest things I've ever been through."

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Because the board was still attached to him by the screw in his head, fire rescue couldn't fit Foreman into the ambulance at first, so they used the family's saw to cut the board down from 5 feet to 2, Ellingsworth said.

Even then, he still had trouble fitting into the first of two helicopters that came to airlift him to the hospital.

"We were on pins and needles" during the delicate operation, said Cohen. He removed tiny fragments of bone and a small blood clot during a two-hour surgery early Sunday.

"He had the board in there a total of about seven hours," his mother said.